green unionism

By staff - IndustriALL, May 18, 2022

Today, manufacturing, mining and energy trade unions, under the umbrella of industriAll European Trade Union, are launching their Just Transition Manifesto.

As Europe gets ready to implement the Green Deal and the measures agreed in the Fit for 55 package, 25 million industrial workers in Europe potentially face restructuring and job losses due to the green transformation of our industries - exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, digitalisation, trade and market developments and a volatile geopolitical situation.

The manifesto is industrial workers’ call to policymakers across Europe to ensure a transition to a green economy that is fair to ALL workers, and that does not destroy but preserves and creates good quality jobs. They want a transition that is anticipated, managed and negotiated with workers for every aspect that concerns them.

To achieve this, we need a comprehensive Just Transition framework that provides guarantees for adequate resources, is based on effective policy planning, promoting and strengthening workers’ rights, and involves trade unions through intense social dialogue.

Our manifesto therefore calls for:

1. An industrial policy fit for ambitious climate goals and good quality jobs.
2. Adequate resources to fund the transition.
3. Stronger collective bargaining and social dialogue to negotiate the transitions.
4. A toolbox of workers’ rights and companies’ duties to anticipate and shape the change.
5. Tackling new skills needs and a right to quality training and life-long learning for every worker to support the Just Transition.

By Marisol Cantú, Micheal Hayes, and staff - Richmond Progressive Alliance, May 16, 2022

Flaring at the Richmond Lubrications Oil Plant. April 14, 2-4 pm.

United Steelworkers (USW) Local 5 workers have been on strike at Richmond's Chevron Refinery since March 21, 2022. Since then, workers and community members have carefully documented flaring events at the refinery, which is currently run by strikebreakers who do not have the necessary training to safely operate the equipment. Below are three important documents of this extremely unsafe situation: a) a letter addressed to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) by organizer Marisol Cantú, articulating the current risks to our surrounding community and demands of relevant inspection agencies; b) a photographic gallery of flaring events taken during the strike by workers and community observers; and c) a letter authored by a USW Local 5 refinery worker, describing the extensive training he and his colleagues receive that is necessary to keep the community safe (and that current employees operating the plant do not have).

By Jessica Goodheart - Capital & Main, May 16, 2022

Tefere Gebre’s biography has touched on the major crises affecting the planet: the massive rise in refugees, skyrocketing economic inequality and climate change. The first of those cataclysms was thrust upon him when he was just a teenager. He fled the civil war in Ethiopia, enduring a perilous 2½ week journey through the desert. “Sometimes you’d find yourself where you were a week ago,” he told Orange Coast magazine in 2014. He spent five months in a refugee camp in Sudan before arriving in Los Angeles, where he attended high school.

As an adult, Gebre became active in the labor movement, organizing trash sorters in Anaheim and holding leadership positions at the Orange County Labor Federation and the AFL-CIO, where he served as executive vice president. In February, he took the position as chief program officer at Greenpeace USA, the 3 million-member direct action organization known for its high-profile banner drops, opposition to whale hunting and campaign against plastic waste.

Capital & Main spoke to Gebre two days before Greenpeace held its first-ever protest in solidarity with fossil fuel workers. Two boats with activists from Greenpeace USA and United Steel Workers Local 5 members formed a picket line from land into San Francisco Bay as an oil tanker headed to Chevron’s Richmond refinery in what Gebre described as “a genuine attempt to build a transformational relationship” with the striking workers. Nearly 500 refinery employees went on strike over safety and salary concerns in March. The two sides have yet to come to an agreement. The oil tanker crossed the picket line, according to sources at Greenpeace.

By Simon Pirani - People and Nature, May 16, 2022

Two clouds darken the sky. A close-up one: gas and electricity bills have shot up since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and millions of families are struggling to pay. And a bigger, darker, higher one: the climate disaster, and politicians’ refusal to tackle it.

Ultimately, both these threats have a single cause: fossil fuels and the systems of wealth and power that depend on them. We need social movements to link the fight to protect families from unaffordable bills with the fight to move beyond fossil fuels, and in that way turn back global warming.

Here I suggest ways to develop such a movement in the UK, starting by demanding action on home heating.

By Sharon Kelly - DeSmog, May 13, 2022

CalPERS and CalSTRS, which oppose fossil fuel divestment legislation, have “wildly exaggerated” divestment costs, according to Fossil Free California’s latest report.

A newly published report by Fossil Free California finds California’s pension fund managers are circulating divestment “misinformation” by exaggerating the costs involved in shedding their fossil fuel investments in documents prepared for state lawmakers.

California lawmakers are currently considering Senate Bill 1173 (SB-1173), California’s Fossil Fuel Divestment Act, which would require the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), to stop investing in fossil fuels before the decade is out. The move would impact billions of dollars currently invested in oil, gas, or coal on behalf of California’s teachers, firefighters, and other public employees.

The report titled “Hyperbole in the Hearings” found that the pension “funds have wildly exaggerated losses from past divestments” like those involving tobacco, firearms, and some forms of coal. It concludes that CalPERS and CalSTRS estimates for costs associated with fossil fuel divestment are also exaggerated.

Extraordinary sums of money, invested on behalf of California’s public employees and teachers, are on the line. The two pension funds have estimated holdings of $7.4 billion and $4.1 billion respectively in fossil fuel investments that would need to be divested if the law went into effect. 

It's time to stop using state employees' retirement savings to finance Big Oil.#SB1173 would divest @CalPERS & @CalSTRS from fossil fuels once & for all—but we need your help!

Click here to call, write, or schedule a meeting with your representative: https://t.co/UM5Nr2RCk5 pic.twitter.com/3ogICu0oad

— Climate Safe Pensions Network (@ClimatePensions) May 13, 2022

By staff - IndustriALL Global Union, May 12, 2022

On 5 May, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), LO Norway and IndustriALL held a first workshop on hydrogen technology as part of the Just Transition and the Energy Sector initiative. The initiative provides a platform for unions around the world to exchange information on energy transition technologies and the jobs, skills, markets, investments, and emissions related to them.

There is no single industry that could replace the oil and gas industry, in terms of jobs and in terms of income. We must consider multiple different technologies when thinking about where jobs are going to transition to,”

said Kenneth Sandmo, Head of business and Industry Policy in the Norwegian Trade Union Confederation (LO Norway).

Putting it into perspective, Sandmo explained that Norway’s oil and gas industry employs more than 200,000 workers directly and indirectly. As the hydrogen sector is projected to create approximately 35,000 jobs in Norway, hydrogen technology shouldn’t be the only focus for trade unions.

Hydrogen technology is key for the long-term decarbonisation of energy intensive industries and sectors such as heavy transport. To get a better view of where jobs are and where they could be, the workshop looked at the value chains of oil and gas and hydrogen. Breaking both value chains down to production, processing, distribution, and end use (upstream, midstream, downstream) provided a clearer view of where the jobs are, and where there is a future for workers to transition in the hydrogen value chain.

By Adam Scott and Patrick DeRochie - Shift Network, May 5, 2022

New analysis finds 80 Canadian pension managers with 124 different roles at 76 fossil fuel companies, raising questions from beneficiaries about fiduciary duty and pension administrators’ potential conflicts of interest on climate-related investment decisions. 

Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health’s May 2022 report, Canada’s Climate-Conflicted Pension Managers: The Oil and Gas Insiders Overseeing Canadians’ Retirement Savings, reveals the deep entanglement between the fossil fuel industry and directors, trustees and investment managers at Canada’s largest public pension funds. 

The overlap raises serious questions from beneficiaries about their pension administrators’ ability to objectively manage climate-related financial risks and make critical climate-related investment decisions – when the pension administrators are so deeply entangled with an industry whose products are the primary cause of the climate crisis, whose bottom line depends on the continued production of climate-damaging products, and that has a long and ongoing legacy of obstructing efforts to cut carbon pollution.

The analysis finds that among Canada’s ten largest pension funds, which together manage more than $2 trillion in assets:

• 80 different pension directors, trustees, executives and senior staff currently hold or previously held 124 different roles with 76 different fossil fuel companies. 

• This includes nine current pension fund directors or trustees that currently hold 13 roles on the board of directors of 12 different fossil fuel companies, and 56 senior staff or investment managers at pension funds who hold 76 different corporate director roles at 39 different fossil fuel companies. 

• Seven of the ten pension funds have at least one board member who simultaneously sits on the board of a fossil fuel company. 

• In some cases, over a quarter of the pension fund’s board has direct connections to the oil and gas industry.

The best long-term interests of pension fund beneficiaries are not aligned with the financial interests of shareholders of fossil fuel companies. A pension director who is also a corporate director of a fossil fuel company could find themself with real or perceived conflicts of interest between their fiduciary duty to invest in the best long-term interests of pension beneficiaries, and their simultaneous legal obligation to act in the financial interests of the fossil fuel company on whose board they sit.

Press Release

Read the text (Link).

By staff - International Trade Union Confederation, May 4, 2022

ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said: “This report lays out a stark reality: global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak before 2025, and we have to cut emissions by 43% by 2030 to give us a chance to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

“That’s a lot, but the report says that solar and wind energy have the potential to deliver over one-third of this target.

“It’s unavoidable: the world needs rapid, deep and immediate investments in jobs to build this infrastructure and deliver the cuts to emissions we need.

“At the same time, the report is clear that we have to leave the oil and gas in the ground to survive. We need fossil fuel infrastructure and subsidies to be repurposed.

“This requires just transition: a plan to convert these jobs in fossil fuels to jobs in clean energy. Every country, every industry, every company, and every investor must have a plan developed, in partnership with working people and their communities, and must implement it rapidly.

“Our report with the World Resources Institute and the New Climate Economy showed that this shift makes economic and social sense too. Investing in solar power creates 1.5 times as many jobs as investing the same amount of money in fossil fuels.

“The IPPC has sounded a call to action for jobs in renewables. Investors, companies and governments need to make this a reality now. We know that for every ten jobs in renewable energy, there are another five to ten in manufacturing supply chains and, if these are good jobs with just wages, 30 to 35 jobs in the broader community.”

The IPPC report makes clear the transformational potential of just transition, saying it can “build social trust, and deepen and widen support for transformative changes”. It goes on to say: “This is already taking place in many countries and regions, as national just transition commissions or task forces, and related national policies, have been established in several countries. A multitude of actors, networks, and movements are engaged.”

Sharan Burrow added: “We need unions at the table everywhere to build these plans and to guarantee income support for secure pensions, reskilling and re-deployment.”